August 2007

August 14, 2007

Ellen, we feel your pain and we’re doing something about it. We've been working for over a year on a sweet … well … a great new tool that will let you rock your data like never before.

The Xoopit bunch hooked up to help you take the effort out of organizing and retrieving your digital life, wherever it is. There's too much stuff out there and it’s impossible to keep your fingers around it. Clear the clutter. We're going to fix that.

A year ago a few of us sat in Ritual Roasters having a gripe session about how bad it is to deal with so much digital stuff on a daily basis.

Each of us felt the pain and we wanted to fix it.

Today we're 9 people in a Mission studio who are cranking out a solution to this problem. And we didn't just hire any engineers. No, we wanted experts who had the same vision. It was so worth the wait to get this team together because we're about to rock the data world!

August 11, 2007

Great advisors help---lots. We knew that we didn't want to reinvent the wheel or suffer the same pitfalls, so we got together a crew that has fought the good fight before.

So there's John McKinley, the former President and CTO of AOL Digital Services. He absolutely rocks the consumer, software, and Internet products. GPS, Blog, P2P, PGP, John knows how to make it all work together and as a business.

Tim Stevens, CEO of http://vside.com/ and the man on the clutch of the Inktomi finance team, was our first mentor. He taught us the ABC’s of venture capital and how put together a tight financing round.

Geoff Ralston, who looked after products at Yahoo, also lends us his ear and keeps us headed in the right direction.

Finally, there's Paul Gauthier, founder of Inktomi: it was his support that got us off the ground, helped us focus our initial strategy, and helped us go from a band of coffee house squatters to a real company.

August 09, 2007

Last summer, JK and I spent almost five months not only working out the product, but also considering different finance strategies and business partners. We learned that great investors can be your strongest allies in support of your mission.

From corporate investors, venture capitalists, to angels....We talked to them all and once again, what it came down to was people. It may sound obvious, but we looked for investors who will stay engaged and believe in the vision.

What we discovered is that it really is a dating process—we visited Foundation Capital over five months, checking in, showing them our prototypes, consumer research, and product planning ideas while we focused the company plan.

That said, we can't thank enough Charles Moldow at Foundation Capital, who took the lead in our Seed Round and who brought not only the right financial resources but also amazing people to our team. Charles is also behind our cousins over at Powerset, the new natural language search engine. The search engine is wicked and we can't wait for them to bust out as well—they are in private beta right now.

Along side of Foundation Capital, we have number of other awesome investors that include:

Paul Gauthier - Inktomi's Co-founder/CTO

Geoff Ralston - former Chief Product Officer at Yahoo

Michael Dearing - SVP Ebay/Stanford D-School Prof

Jeremy Verba - CEO of Piczo

Eric Tilenius - Netcentives, Tilenius Ventures

Tim Stevens - CEO at Doppelganger

Bill Trenchard - founder and Chairman of LiveOps

Jim Everingham - founder and CTO of LiveOps

Suresh Nihalani - CEO at Clearmesh

Emil Michael - SVP at Tellme

Jonny Schuloff - Partner at GTI-LLC

Our investors have been tremendously generous with their time and support. We've brought the investment community together for strategy dinners with the company, 1-1's, and round table discussions. These meetings have been oh-so valuable. Not only that, our community has brought us an air of executive gravitas, which has been very supportive to company as we have been in the throws of creating something from nothing!